Remember the good old days? April 2004? Every employer in the country
received a booklet signed by Des Browne, Documents employers should
use to check the right to work. 18 documents were listed in the back
and, if a potential recruit had some appropriate combination of them,
it was legal to employ that person. We knew where we stood. Happy days.

They didn't last. In October 2006, the Home
Office published a cost report on ID cards. They say it's often hard
to ascertain who people are. It's hard for the prison service. It's hard
for the Criminal Records Bureau Registered Bodies. And: "currently,
employers do not have a reliable means of establishing whether a job applicant
has the right to work here". Gone was the certainty of Mr Browne's
18 documents.

In their place came biometrics. 41 times biometrics are mentioned in
the slim 13-page cost report. Biometrics are the answer to illegal immigration,
illegal working, sex offences, false asylum claims, terrorism, identity
fraud and inefficient public services. But when? When would the biometrics
silver bullet be fired?

Roll forward two months to December 2006 and the Strategic Action
Plan for the National Identity Scheme, published by the Identity
and Passport Service (IPS). Salvation is at Annex 1 – an "enhanced
employee checking service" will be "available for employers"
by June 2007. But June 2007 came and went, there was no sign of our enhanced
employee checking service, and there still isn't.

Why hasn't this strategic action been performed by IPS? Is there perhaps
a problem with the biometrics?

There must be. Because it's not just the enhanced checking service, amongst
the Annex 1 strategic actions, which is missing. "Biometric procurement"
also was meant to start by June 2007, and still hasn't. And the
Crosby report on public/private identity management, due by April
2007, remains to this day unpublished.

When the Prime
Minister writes, as he did on 17 January 2008, that biometrics "will
make it possible to securely link an individual to a unique identity",
he is misinformed.

Flash back to May 2005, when the report on the UKPS
biometrics enrolment trial was published. Turn to the Key Findings
section of the Management Summary, and what do we find? We find
that fingerprints do not work about 20% of the time.

Never mind criminals and terrorists. 20% of the rest of us aren't going
to be able to prove our legal right to work in the UK either. Not if that
proof depends on biometrics.

Say there are 35 million people working in the UK. 20% of 35 million
is seven million. Seven million people will find themselves legally unable
to work. At least one of them will bring a court case. At that point it
will be discovered that the biometrics proposed for use by IPS are so
unreliable that they are not admissible as evidence in court. The case
will collapse, confidence in ID cards will collapse and all the money
spent on them will have been wasted.

Not admissible as evidence in court? That can't be right, can it?

It can. David
Blunkett himself told us so in July 2002: "The fingerprinting
of asylum seekers to a legal standard of proof (unlike that suggested
for the entitlement card scheme) helps to ensure that an individual cannot
make more than one application for asylum and that the fingerprint evidence
can be used in court".

The traditional fingerprinting technology – rolled prints, taken by police
experts, using ink – the technology the world has known about for a century,
and which we all, rightly, have confidence in, is admissible as evidence
in court. But that isn't the technology IPS propose to use. They want
to use flat prints – a glorified photocopy of our fingers, clean, quick,
no expert required and utterly unreliable.

To refer to these two different technologies by one name, the same name,
"fingerprinting", is a confidence trick.

Now roll forward to 14 January 2008 and Liam
Byrne MP: "Illegal working attracts illegal migrants and undercuts
British wages. That's why we're determined to shut it down". How?
"Employers will be fined up to £10,000 for every illegal worker they
negligently hire or could face up to two years in prison".

Employers remain liable even though we have no way to check the right
to work. We don't have a way to check because IPS haven't provided it.
And IPS haven't provided it because they can't – the biometrics on which
they depend aren't reliable enough to do the job.